Our heartiest congratulations go to Fergal Keane whose latest title, Wounds, has won Non-fiction Book of the Year at The BGE Irish Book Awards.

Now in its 12th year, the ceremony took place in Dublin’s Clayton Hotel and was attended by a number of those from the publishing industry including John Banville, Roddy Doyle and David Walliams, who was honoured with the ‘International Recognition Award’.

Larry MacHale, Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards’ chairperson, said: “When you scan the list of award winners, it makes you feel proud to be part of an industry that produces so many great Irish writers.

Dave Kirwan, m.d of Bord Gáis Energy, added: “The 2017 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards have shown, yet again, that we in Ireland are blessed with a huge amount of literary talent, so to receive one of these awards is a significant achievement indeed. The quality of the shortlisted entries across each of the categories was incredibly high, and I hope that this year’s event will inspire those who perhaps didn’t win an award this year to enter again in the coming years.”

This year, more than 50,000 people voted to select the winners in each category. From Thursday (29th November), the public can vote for their overall ‘Bord Gáis Energy Book of the Year’ by visiting

Published by HarperCollins imprint, William Collins, Wounds is a Sunday Times Bestseller.

After nearly three decades reporting conflict from all over the world for the BBC, Fergal Keane has gone home to Ireland to tell a story that lies at the root of his fascination with war. It is a family story of war and love, and how the ghosts of the past return to shape the present.

Wounds is a powerful memoir about Irish people who found themselves caught up in the revolution that followed the 1916 Rising, and in the pitiless violence of civil war in north Kerry after the British left in 1922.

It is the story of Keane’s grandmother Hannah Purtill, her brother Mick and his friend Con Brosnan, and how they and their neighbours took up guns to fight the British Empire and create an independent Ireland. And it is the story of another Irishman, Tobias O’Sullivan, who fought against them as a policeman because he believed it was his duty to uphold the law of his country.

Many thousands of people took part in the War of Independence and the Civil War that followed. Whatever side they chose, all were changed in some way by the costs of violence. Keane uses the experiences of his ancestral homeland in north Kerry to examine why people will kill for a cause and how the act of killing reverberates through the generations.